Tech Progressive, So Regressive.

There's nothing progressive in policy discussions premised on technocratic authority rather than democratic deliberation. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in "disruption" that amounts to the deregulatory enablement of fraud. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about "innovation" that simply loots and privatizes public goods or externalizes public risks. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in eugenic "enhancement" promoting conformity and docility as competitiveness and as health. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating wanted human lifeways as diseased and criminal kinds of personhood demanding "cure." #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in pretending robocalypse is an existential threat and climate change an engineering problem. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about dreams of escaping our shared responsibilities into outer space or virtual reality. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about identifying with robots or treating people as robots. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about turning education into television or even into video games. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating consumer fashions as activism or consumer fandoms as movements. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in the pretense that corporate-military status quo amplification is progress. #TechProgressive

I am embarrassed to admit my own complicity in the emergence of the technoprogressive term now current in some circles of neoliberal tech talkers and "Thought Leaders." Interested readers will note the appropriated arguments and even phrases in the wikipedia entry for technoprogressivism, alluded to in the 2014 robocultic transhumanist Technoprogressive Declaration, all from my own Technoprogressivism: Beyond Technophilia and Technophobia, published nearly a decade before that Declaration. I realized quite soon after writing that rather programmatic piece that its formulations were being taken up in stealth-reactionary futurological "tech" circles seeking to sanewash eugenic, libertarian, neoliberal, digi-utopian, greenwashing, facile reductionist and determinist views about technodevelopmental politics. I soon came to believe that the susceptibility of my formulations to these deceptive and tech-propagandistic appropriations was a product of my own under-interrogated use of the term "technology" in the piece as monolithic and extricable from and hence apparently substitutable for politics in ways that facilitated what I now recognize as a host of familiar reactionary futurological gestures -- the naturalization of elite incumbent interests as a-political, the substitution of marketing norms and forms for modes of reflection and analysis, the treatment of wish-fulfillment fantasies as scientific predictions, the investment of such speculation with transcendental significance, and the transformation of these discourses into subcultural formations, identity movements and consumer fandoms. For a recent and concise elaboration of the critique eventuating in part from experience of the techno-transcendental appropriation of my early efforts I recommend Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.

Nature's Artiface: Negative Liberty, Spontaneous Order, and Reactionary Tech

"Negative" liberties are forms of positive liberty that manage to disavow, by naturalizing, their contingent and artificial affordances. "Spontaneous" orders are forms of order that manage to deny their parochialism, history and costs through the force of their incumbency. "Nature" derives from the Latin nasci, to be born, to appear, but it matters that labor precedes birth and preparation enables appearance.

The essential work of the discourse of naturalization has come to be its disavowal of the artifice of what passes for the natural, this is an accomplishment indicated not least by the treatment of nature as the contrary to artifice rather than as a species of it. To belabor the obvious here, naturalization conduces to the maintenance or amplification of the status quo and to reactionary politics.

There is an affinity in the de-politicizing gesture through which always only some artifacts/techniques are constituted as "technology," and then the ready investment of some technologies so constituted with the work of a-politicizing conservatism. Techno-libertarian ideology absolutely depends on these discursive ploys, as when the end-to-end principle is implicitly identified with negative liberty, then enables the advocacy of plutocracy as meritocracy, or when prior faith in natural, virtuous spontaneous order (confirming its advocates they should rule, naturally) transforms encryption from technique to world-historical force that would abolish the unnatural, vicious barriers to the flowering of that spontaneous order.

Scattered Speculations on Vulgar Science Fiction Through the Futurological Looking Glass

Although I am a passionate fan of science/speculative fiction literature, film, fandom, I realize that I rarely write about sf here and that I probably should. The exception that proves the rule happens to be one of my favorite essays here at Amor Mundi, by the way: Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes. I do take sf seriously, and I make very regular recourse to it in my science-technonlogy-studies (STS) and environmental-justice-movement (EJM) teaching at Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. If you scroll down to the "Science Fiction" heading in The Superlative Summary you will find seven other pieces on sf there, tho' I'd say the quality is mixed at best.

The focus of my work and my writing here and elsewhere has, for whatever reasons out of the strange vicissitudes of personal and professional biography, turned out instead to be mostly the critique of futurological discourses and futurist sub(cult)ural formations. I happen to think that futurology is the quintessential discourse of neoliberal corporate-militarism, and that the strange exhibitions made by robocultic futurisms are a kind of reductio ad absurdum or iceberg tip symptomizing prevailing pathologies of postwar-to-ecocatastrophist capitalism. As a democratic socialist (or social democrat, if you like) Green, all this matters to me enormously, of course.

I do often make the point that futurological "scenarios" are in my view the definitive literary genre of the neoliberal epoch -- which really amounts to the truism that marketing norms and forms disastrously suffuse postwar public discourses -- and this observation also often leads me to joke that these futurological "scenarios" are actually just impoverished forms of science fiction, but, you know, entirely bereft of clever plots, interesting characters, or sustained themes. Indeed, most futurological “scenarios” amount to little more than stipulated settings of a scene (hence their name) and then filled with dystopian/utopian wish-fulfillment fantasizing. Again, I daresay the connections to advertising are obvious. Hilariously, these settings are themselves inevitably borrowed from actual science fiction writers, and given the plausibility that attaches to the familiar, futurologists tend to recycle those conceits real writers would disdain as cliches.

I will also say that I regard the familiar pretense that science/speculative fiction is an essentially or even primarily "predictive" genre to be a vulgar futurological fallacy. Works in any literary genre can be accidentally or incidentally predictive -- but sf, like all great literature, is constitutive of and responsive to living, earthly polyculture. It is the open futurity inhering in the diversity of stakeholders contending and collaborating in the present, in their presence, that provokes the allegories, commentaries, myths, testimonies of science/speculative fictional futures. It will perhaps seem paradoxical from the vulgar futurological vantage that has come so much to define the sfnal in the neoliberal epoch, but for me it is because it is so exquisitely the genre not of the future but the future anterior tense that sf is indeed a prophetic literary form.

Leave it to capitalists idiotically to mis-identify sales pitches for prophesies. You can be sure that the same futurological impulse that would loot and dismantle the (to be sure, deeply flawed) Academy and substitute for it a promotional for-profit archipelago of corporate-military think-tanks and universities re-made by financial managers and techno-fixers in the image of the same think-tanks, and who extol venture-capitalist skim-and-scam artists and self-promoting celebrity CEOs and guru-wannabes as "Thought Leaders," would also insist we celebrate as "The Literature of Ideas" sf as an exhortation to mass acquiescence to status-quo amplification marketed as progress, disruption, accelerating change, and transcendence!

Another vulgar futurological gesture is embodied in the periodic policing of science/speculative fiction for "positivity" -- and this impulse seems to me equally in evidence in the recent facile Stephensonian call for cruelly optimistic can-do science fiction as well as in the ugly racism and sexism of the Sad Puppies who also fancy themselves to be defending the civilizational citadel. To clarify, in each of these cases a gesture that would reduce sf literature to consumer-capitalist or white-supremacist or patriarchal (that is, sexist/heterosexist/cissexist) agitprop -- which would be bad enough -- but actually amounts to the even worse, but by now completely conventional, subsumption of sf literature into the prevailing deceptive, hyperbolic, triumphalist, apocalyptic, eugenic, techno-fetishistic faith-based norms and forms of neoliberal corporate-militarist marketing, promotion, self-promotion, advertising as public discourse.

As I always insist, every futurism is a retro-futurism, inasmuch as "The Future" is always a parochialism rationalizing and reassuring elite-incumbents of forever ongoing status-quo amplification. "Disruption" usually amounts the deregulatory dismantlement of democracy in the service of plutocracy, "innovation" usually amounts to the promotional re-packaging of stale and discarded commodities as novelties, "resilience" usually amounts to exploiters congratulating those who manage to survive their exploitation to be exploited still more, "accelerating change" usually amounts to the increasing precarity of majorities as experienced by minorities who either benefit from that precarity or foolishly identify with those who do. Again, the only thing more typical of postwar capitalism than compulsory "positivity" about our soul-wrecking planet-wrecking extractive-industrial-consumerist corporate-militarism is to add the insult to these injuries that we testify endlessly to the progressive productivity of this wreckage.

Benjaminian angel of history, smh.

Futurologists, Who Needs 'Em? A Twitterrant On Familiar Themes

A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the technoscientific state of the art in research or engineering. A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the stakeholders contesting a technodevelopmental outcome politically. A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to grasp critical or creative responses to technoscientific vicissitudes. A futurist is who you want to talk to if you want to go to a corporate pep rally (innovate!) or see an ad peddling consumerism (gizmos!).

There are already-constituted disciplines and experts doing every single legitimate thing one might foolishly turn to futurists for. Futurism is an anti-disciplinarity pretending to be an inter-disciplinarity.

In all this, futurism is of a piece with an anti-intellectual, anti-academic corporate-military think-tankification of public discourse as well as the suffusion of all public life with the deceptive, hyperbolic norms and forms of promotional and marketing discourses.

Syllabus for This Fall's "Homo Economicus: Modern Political Economy and the English Comedy of Manners"

"Homo Economicus: Modern Political Economy and the English Comedy of Manners"

September 1-December 8, 2015, Seminar Room 18, Tuesdays, 1.00-3.45
Instructor: Dale Carrico; dcarrico@sfai.edu
Course Web-Site: http://homoecoonstage.blogspot.com/
Rough Grade Breakdown (subject to contingencies): Attendance/Participation 12%; Notebook 12%; Precis 16%; Essay 1 30%; Essay 2 30%

Course Description

Capitalism is so funny we forgot to laugh. In this course we will be reading plays drawn from over three hundred years of mannered comedy, some of the most coarse, witty, perverse, lively, and stylish works in English literature. From Early Modern Restoration comedies modeling the libertine rebel Rochester like The Man of Mode, The Rover, The Way of the World, and the Beggar's Opera, to High Modern high camp fascinated by the figure of Oscar Wilde from Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience to The Importance of Being Earnest to Noel Coward, up to Late Modern work from Joe Orton and Jennifer Saunders resonating with the space oddities of David Bowie: we will not only be reading these hilarious and hellraising plays, but staging their key scenes in class for one another in an effort to inhabit them more viscerally. The premise of the course is that these plays stage efforts to satirize and cope with definitive contradictions of modern capitalism but also with paradoxes of corporate-militarist societies and cultures more generally, especially what I will call the plutocratic paradox (a meritocratic rationalization and enactment of aristocracy), the patriarchal paradox (a sexist, heterosexist, cissexist homosocial order that must disavow its queer possibilities), and the planetary paradox (a nationalist project impossibly comprehending ramifying multicultures in "the cultural" while embedded in a global nation-state system in which it impossibly competes via the racist war-machine of "the social"). Readings from political economy and cultural theory from Hobbes, Smith, Marx, and Mill, Pateman, Berlant, and Edelman, Williams, Sontag, and Bruce LaBruce will help us grapple with the plays and the spectacle they make of themselves. Consider the course a contribution to Urbane Studies.

Provisional Schedule of Meetings:

Week One (September)

1 Administrative and Course Introductions.

Week Two

8 Lawrence Dunmore, dir. "The Libertine"

Week Three

15 Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and Moderns. Hobbes on Equality, on Power, on Laughter. A selection of poems by Rochester.

Week Four

22 Etherege, The Man of Mode. Raymond Williams, on Culture, Society, Urbanity

Week Five

29. Aphra Behn, The Rover. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

Week Six (October)

6 Wycherley, The Country Wife. Texts in the Jeremy Collier controversy.

Week Seven

13 Congreve, The Way of the World, including the Preface. Paul Parnell, "The Sentimental Mask"

Week Eight

20 Sheridan, Rivals. Adam Smith. Kant, History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather.

Week Nine

27 Gay, The Beggars Opera. (The Threepenny Opera) Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

Week Ten (November)

3 Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience. Oscar Wilde, Preface to Dorian Gray and Phrases and Philosophies for the Young; Wilde on the witness stand.

Week Eleven

10 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. Sontag, Notes on Camp; Bruce LaBruce Camp/Anti-Camp

Week Twelve

17 Noel Coward, Private Lives; Hands Across the Sea (screening a performance starring Joan Collins).

Week Thirteen

24 Joe Orton, The Good and Faithful Servant. Lauren Berlant, "Cruel Optimism" and Lee Edelman, "No Future."

Week Fourteen (December)

2 Todd Haynes, dir. "Velvet Goldmine." From Dick Hebdige: Style: The Meaning of Subculture.

Week Fifteen

8 Bacchanal: Jennifer Saunders, Absolutely Fabulous, "Death," "Doorhandle." Videos: Sun Ra, Bowie, Glam, Disco, Jarman, New Romantics, Ga Ga, Janelle Monae, Hi Fashion, so much more…

Hole/Whole

Liberty is an empty hole in the world compared to freedom. Freedom is a world full of recognition, care, and support.

Resilient Precariat

The neoliberal futurological term "resilience" celebrates people surviving abuse and neglect so that plutocrats can accumulate more wealth.

The Vienna Circle Was A Gerbil Wheel And Techbros Are Still On It

Today's techies and nerd pundits rather remind me of logical positivists and Anglo-American analytic philosophers. They too fancied themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room and after superficial readings of rich archives rolled up their shirtsleeves. They declared themselves eager and able to circumvent or dismiss philosophical quandaries and topple moral/political Business As Usual. They confidently declared themselves masters of topics they largely missed the point of, re-invented a lot of wheels to run around on. They established lots of marginal fandoms devoted to official puzzle-solving and ignored everybody while everybody else ignored them.

Now our nerd pundits offer up reductive superficial pie-charted "explainers" as our techies breathlessly re-invent laissez-faire pieties. Our nerds are so "smart" they think appliances are intelligent and our tech-talkers peddle "progress" while denying commonwealth. Our anti-intellectual "Thought Leaders" are so uneducated they don't even know their facile errors are a stale re-run of earlier errors.

I know that nerds and geeks Rule now (at least the dim white reactionary reductionist ones) but nobody cares about logical positivists. I don't expect people outside the clubhouse to care much for long for our innovative Thought Leaders "getting to the bottom of things." Sure, the coterie of super-rich techies can do some damage with their market fundamentalist pieties but that's just because they're rich. But the anti-historical sociopathic reductionist nerds and geeks are mostly just dumb, another American anti-intellectual boy's club.

By way of conclusion I'll add that I don't think geekdom had or has to play out in this cramped uncritical fashion http://t.co/1HvsNweAa0

Over-Clarked

Any sufficiently advanced magical thinking is indistinguishable from technology journalism.

The More Things Stay The Same The More They Are Marketed As Change

I truly do not understand popular representations of retired folks presumably befuddled by an internet that actually hasn't substantially changed much since they began surfing it, texting on it, making transactions with it themselves in what was at most middle age. In American popular culture the moment you hit retirement age you are transformed into someone who lived through the New Deal and World War II even if your adolescence was spent on rollerskates listening to Disco. I have noticed that cultural signifiers of the seventies and eighties and now even the nineties are weirdly mulching into an archive of indifferent simultaneity. I wonder will the real stasis of the contemporary US culture finally become palpable when kids realize their cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts are indistinguishable from their parents' cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts?

Disturbing!

Abortion isn't more "disturbing" than an appendectomy. If you support women's healthcare stop conceding this ridiculous point to the forced pregnancy zealots.

Humans ARE Animals

Cruelty to nonhuman animals enables cruelty among human animals.
Solidarity with nonhuman animals builds solidarity among human animals.

Queen of the Libertechbrotarians

From Business Insider, Wall Street's Former Queen of Commodities Just Made Her Pitch for Why Bitcoin Is the Future:

Bitcoin technology could reshape the way financial markets operate. That is according to Blythe Master[s], the chief executive of Digital Asset Holdings, and one of the biggest names in the business... Everything from stock to bonds and derivatives could be exchanged and paid for in the same way the cryptocurrency community is executing bitcoin transactions, Masters said. Still, it is early on. Masters compared where Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are now in terms of their development to early 1990s Internet. "In reality, the world is not there yet," Masters said. She said the industry would have to address regulatory hurdles as it confronts issues like authentication and security in coming years. Masters was one of a group of JPMorgan executives who helped create the market for credit default swaps in the 1990s, and later went to head its global commodities division.

Yes, a "Thought Leader" who helped engineer the global crash just a few years ago by peddling fraudulent financial instruments to circumvent regulations and sound investment norms is at it again.

And why not? This Business Insider piece wasn't written after a visit to Blythe Masters in the prison cell she belongs in, after all, and it's not like she has common sense or conscience to constrain her, that much is clear. Why, she's "one of the biggest names in the business," we are told! What else does anybody need to know?

The plausibility of "Bitcoin" and comparable crypto-currency schemes always derives (surprisingly explicitly surprisingly often) from anarcho-capitalist fantasies of natural market forces (of which there are literally none) generating optimally efficient and just "spontaneous orders" (of which there has never been nor ever will be one). The usual popular postwar Randroidal and Friedmaniacal just-so stories and nonsense rationalizations for plutocracy and white supremacy bubble and boil this discursive cauldron to its froth, of course. Note that regulation is figured here as a "hurdle" for "the industry," for example.

But notice as well that problems are figured as merely technical, and therefore technically solvable: "authentication" and "security" await their programming fixes, no social or ethical questions bedevil the pristine instrumental prospect... let us unleash the bulldozers! What the last thirty years has taught us above all is that it is techno-transcendental rhetoric in particular that transforms these commonplace confusions, deceptions, and self-congratulatory cons into the cadences of progressive and spiritual revelations that drive the popular imagination from solidarity and suicide.

The wistful call back to the glory days of the "early 1990s Internet" is a tip-off: You remember the early 1990s, surely, the beginning of The Long Boom, in which space was abolished, cryptoanarchy smashed all the states, Cyberspace was the Home of Mind, virtuality transformed reality, nanotech delivered superabundance, California Extropians said "No!" to Death and Taxes, and pop futurists were revealing on a daily basis the techs That! Would! Change! Everything!

Oh, for a to return to the days of Irrational Exuberance! The Smartest Guys in the Room could really squeeze a fortune from the rubes back then!

Even in this short, throwaway piece, you should notice that it is a futurological formulation that provides all the juice: "The world is not there yet."

A denial of basic knowledge is articulated in the form of a prophetic utterance, whereupon the brute force of technological determination and superlative destining are called forth to shunt the realities of precarious bodies, historical struggles, lawless violations, and ecosystemic limits out of sight, out of mind to make way for frictionless flows of capital and fountainheads of cyberspatial spirit-stuff.

Of course, state forms are the point of departure for any macroeconomics. So sorry to harsh your bliss, but what passes for "the market" in any historical epoch will be an artifact of laws, norms, pricing conventions, and infrastructural affordances articulated and maintained by states and public investment. Meanwhile, currency itself, not to put too fine a point on it, is what states authorize as instruments for the payment of public debt.

There is of course much more to say on these topics (do read Polanyi), but there is no point in saying anything at all before all the participants in the conversation grasp these fundamental and foundational facts of the matter at hand. To deny such things is not to have revolutionary thoughts but to testify in public either to complete ignorance on the topic at hand or to a willingness to engage in fraud. I don't know whether she is a market fundamentalist zealot, or a full on techno-utopian True Believer, or just a con-artist looking to hack together her next personally profitable bit of financial fraud, indifferent to the lives and hopes ruined by her clever schemes and technical gew-gaws. Blythe Masters is advocating nothing short of looting and warlordism and the neoliberal tech press, settled in the midst of the still smoking ruins and ballooning bodies of a world wrecked by these facile frauds, cheers her stupid destructive pieties as a "Deep Think," natch.

"Tech's" Assertive Disavowals of History: A Twitter Essaylet

The power of "tech" discourses to incumbent interests arises from the way they disavow history while appearing to assert substance. The work of "tech" discourses of prosthetic or therapeutic "enhancement," for example, is to disavow the interdependence of human agency. The one to be "enhanced" is always already the isolated neglected precarized individual "self," their "enhancement" (setting aside the hyperbole & deceptions typical in such presentations) valorizes and naturalizes this isolated self, then offers compensatory fantasies of "capacity" that never redeem violations compelled by the sociopathic model of selfhood they fortify.

The real work of "tech" discourses of AI is to disavow the incarnation of intelligence and responsibility in living bodies and history. The investment of human-made machines with intelligence and agency -- as when we treat "autonomous" weapons as killers, or algorithms as bureaucrats -- divests humans of intelligence and agency, denigrates intelligence and responsibility in their human forms: the better to rationalize the mistreatment of humans as if they were robots, the better to disavow responsibility for murderous uses of artifacts or rationalize callous decisions by bureaucrats.

As Evgeny Morozov mentioned in a tweet yesterday (an observation that set me off on this twitter-essaylet), the real work of "tech" discourses of Smart this'n-that is to disavow the artificial imposition by elites of austerian scarcity: What makes a smart device "smart" is its promise to make do with less, and quite apart from the fact that "Smart" gizmos rarely live up to the hype with which they are marketed -- indeed, what gets peddled as "smart" tends to end up looking stupid before it gets tossed into the landfill to poison the world --what one is not paying attention to when one is celebrating coping with less is the question just why are we compelled to cope with less? 

Why are we coping with less? Is the leanness necessary? Is it shared? Are some benefiting disproportionately from the leanness of others? It is one thing to grasp sustainable civilization must stop fantasies of limitless growth and harmless waste with shared problem-solving, but quite a lot of the "tech" that gets called Smart seems instead to facilitate the erosion of social support and collective humanity.

"Smartness" figures unintelligent artifacts as intelligent: the literal denigration of humans follows upon their figurative denigration. The real work of "tech" discourses of Design and Technocratic policy is to disavow their hostility to and demolition of democracy. Designers amount to small cohorts of privileged individuals claiming to solve political problems by circumventing political processes: So digirati promise to code democracy from privileged enclaves, green design promises sustainability without threatening consumerism, designers fail to accomplish their avowed universal ends while succeeding in self-promotion and parochial profitability for incumbents. In a related development, Paul Krugman has taken to describing so-called neoliberal technocrats as "faithocrats":

Espousing faith in serially failed austerity and trickle-down, they peddle their plutocratic politics as neutral apolitical engineering. Of course, no "tech" has a single politics, but the disavowal of politics through the conjuration of "tech" is indeed a "tech" politics.

It is never true that all artifacts and techniques are discerned as "tech": We describe only some of the field of the artifactual as "tech" while naturalizing the rest of that field as the natural, the customary. There is an inevitable de-politicization of that which is naturalized, and that naturalization always conduces to the status-quo and its beneficiaries.

Further, when "tech" fixates on power as capacitation then promises to solve/circumvent political problems with instrumental rationality, such "tech" discourses always disfigure freedom and progress as political categories as they also disable democratic processes.

The disavowal of history at the heart of prevailing "tech" discourses is reactionary, reductionist and anti-democratizing in its thrust. Only by pluralizing, narrativizing, politicizing "tech" can we engage critically in real progressive technoscientific social struggle. fin.

Why "Stupid Or Evil?" Is So Often Stupid And Evil

For a conception of good connected to democratic virtues (eg, reliably informed nonduressed people are capable of consenting to the terms on which they freely associate with one another, government is legitimated through the consent of the governed, the scene of consent is secured by the provision of general welfare -- basic income, healthcare, education -- and equal recourse to the law and civil rights, government facilitates the nonviolent adjudication of disputes including disputes over the question of what violence consists of) the evil it opposes is often conjoined to stupidity, to the extent that stupidity is mostly the denial of warrantedly assertible beliefs about matters of fact that otherwise attract the consensus of reasonable people or relevant scientific experts.

Wonder V Plunder

Science is suffused with Not Knowing. Pseudo-science is enthused with Know-Nothings and Know-It-Alls.

UPDATED: Zandria Robinson Fired From University of Memphis for Saying Obviously True Things About Racism in America?

I agree with Zandria Robinson that there is no substance to "whiteness" apart from white supremacy. I say so in my classes and I won't stop saying so.

If, like me, you are legible as a "white" person in terms of the irrational rationality of race in America, you can be anti-racist but you cannot be not-racist: you are a beneficiary of white supremacy and positioned by whiteness to incarnate racist biases. There is no way to be "white" and also "right" when it comes to race in America -- this is a demanding and uncomfortable and often quite heart-breaking recognition -- but surely you will have noticed that to be "black" in white-supremacist America is also demanding, uncomfortable, and heartbreaking? There is no way to be right under racism. Racism is wrong. And the wrongness hurts.

It is surely a measure of white-privilege to fancy that you could opt out of racism in a way that would not cost you something, that you could simply decide your way out of racism by understanding it a bit better. You better believe that black people understand racism a whole lot better than white-allies do, and you certainly don't see that understanding rendering them immune to racist violence, exploitation, and bias. This sort of thinking is almost as bad as would-be anti-racist white folks who seem to expect to be petted and praised for trying to do what they say is the right thing, rather than simply trying to do the right thing because it is the right thing, or who expect special immunity from criticism when they fail to do the right thing because they say they are trying to do the right thing, rather than simply trying harder to do the right thing because they say they are trying to do the right thing.

Robinson's recent comments about the Confederate and US flags are easy for me to sympathize with as well -- I said some roughly similar things in public here. Nothing I am saying now is the least bit original or exemplary on my part. I try to be an ally to people of color in white-racist America but I cannot say that my efforts have ever been worthy of attention or are the least bit extraordinary. They are at best a matter of common decency with a bit of historical awareness thrown in. I don't expect to get fired for saying these sorts of things in teaching contexts -- as I very regularly do -- and nobody should. I don't expect to get a lot of grief for pointing these things out in writing here and there, though this is not the emphasis of my work or my politics.

As far as I can make out, it is nothing but obscene that Zandria Robinson has lost her job over her unpopular but useful public critiques, if that is what has happened here. I can't see that many people have even been paying attention to this apart from a lot of howling reactionaries (anti-civilizational Daily Caller and David Horowitz witch-hunting and book-burning for free-dumb types) who decided to organize to attack a vulnerable academic in anti-intellectual America for trying to teach her students to question their worldviews a bit in the service of equity-in-diversity. I hope she is supported by academic and activist communities and rises to new heights from this attack to continue her work.

UPDATE: The University of Memphis is now saying that Robinson was not fired but has left for a better position -- but their earlier announcement seemed to be shaped in response to right-wing pressure in a way the lead much of the right-wing to celebrate her leaving as a great victory. There would appear to be more to the story than we know now. I sure do hope Robinson was not fired and that she is already moving on to do better things with more support.

Tex Lex

disruption=looting
innovation=repackaging
risk-taking=upward-failing
acceleration=precarization
sharing=sharecropping

Teaching, Atheism and Nonviolence

The least study of the theory and history of nonviolent resistance turns up its conspicuous connection to religious belief. Some of the earliest formulations of the notion appear in foundational Buddhist and Christian texts, the examples of nonviolence readiest to hand tend to have religious movements in tow, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King, Day, Nhat Hanh, and on and on.

The premise of my Berkeley summer intensive course "What Is Compelling?" is that persuasive discourse is a site for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes, not because it is an "outside" to violence -- the naive distinction of persuasion and violence disavows, after all, both the threat of violence that inheres in so much persuasion as well as the deeper trouble that any testimony to violation secures its legibility as such only through a circumscription of norms that constitutes an epistemic violence of its own, rendering other possible testimonies to violation illegible -- but because rhetoric, with its definitive focus on the traffic between literalization and figuration in signification attends to the terms on which these legibilties are conferred and volatized and hence provides the opening for dispute over the ongoing constitution of violence and hence competing claims in dispute that would be nonviolent.

This premise is, whatever else, separable from questions of theology. For me personally, as an atheist and both a scholar and activist of nonviolence, this separability is hardly surprising, but for me that doesn't quite get at the connection at hand, because my interest and commitment to nonviolence was not only preceded by my arrival at atheist conviction but was provoked and shaped by that atheism. Obviously, mine is not the only path to nonviolent commitment -- nor, would it seem, the usual one -- but it is my path, and hence a possible one. For me the arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice, but bends from just us: that the world is what we make of it and that all we have is one another seems as firm a foundation for nonviolence and the democratization with which it is connected as any faith to my eyes.

That is why it is striking to me how rarely this connection is elaborated in such terms. The Levinasian distinction of discourse from violence (with which the influence of Judith Butler has given me affinities) is leveraged explicitly on the Biblical injunction "Thous Shalt Not Kill"; the Arendtian account that has (unsurprisingly) long been an influence is a formalism (I take quite seriously, on literally her terms, her assertions that "nonviolent politics" is a redundancy and "violent power" a contradiction in terms), regard her assimilation of violence to instrumentality useful but incomplete, and note that when the account is fleshed out, things get theological quite soon after all: forgiveness is a "miracle," political action "redeems" political cycles of retribution, natality resonates with its Augustinian genuflection to "a child is born unto the world," and Eichmann must hang. The Foucauldian supplement of productive power is still mucked in the red thread of disciplinarity, the repressivity of which is (at least chronologically) continuous with the formulation of the power without a Kingly head (it got chopped off, you know). Zizek's little book on violence is some help, perversely enough, but his usual glib recourse to "Lacan" is, I don't know, Jesuitical.

We take up some of these questions in class today, but in a way that reflects my frustration, reading essays claiming pretty much everything but what I would want to myself: various religious believers asserting that atheism supports and implies violent politics, various atheists asserting that religious belief supports and implies violent politics, and strategists of nonviolence who circumvent questions of faith in a way that also divests nonviolence of an ethical dimension.

Priestly Futurists

"Elias Altvall" commented elsewhere in the same Moot I mentioned in the last post, "I see futurologists like priests." To this observation I responded:

This analogy is definitely clearest in the guru-wannabe layer of the organizational archipelago of robocultic sects. But I tend to think the more apt analogy is the crass salesmanship of the middle-managers and PR-glad handlers, barking on cellphones and laser-pointing at PowerPoint slides the latest line in BS.

Consumer capitalist marketing is an endless peddling of stasis as novelty and crap as wish-fulfillment. And I think futurological discourse is just a slightly amplified variation of that dance of death. That most futurologists likely disdain or at any rate fail to grasp their kinship with their more prevalent middle-brow discursive cousins just goes to show that they aren't exactly very sensitive or bright, even as they congratulate themselves on their superior scientificity and visionary genius. No doubt there are plenty of banksters with the same delusions of grandeur.

Neither is it surprising on these terms to see that futurologists so readily fancy themselves parts of futurist "movements" -- eugenic transhumanism, history-shattering singularitarianism, greenwashing geo-engineering, the various techno-immortalisms, plastic/nuclear/nano/3Dprinter-cornucopisms, and so on -- after all, consumer fandoms around Apple gizmos fancy themselves movement no less. In No Logo, Naomi Klein described a company exec declaring Diesel Jeans "a movement."

Think of those self-esteem hucksters and the authors of management technique best-sellers, offering up their vapid but lucrative consolations in packed Vegas auditoriums -- they are the same sort of guru-wannabes some lucky TED-talking futurologists manage to become, spouting slogans and neologisms and offering up their desperately hyperbolized advertorial promises, sex and success, like every empty ad shouting its lies on every screen.

"The Future" -- that would-be heaven of certainty and satisfaction and youthful skin -- is the faith that suffuses our catastrophically stupid society, its deceptive, hyperbolic norms and forms distract and derange us on our way to death as we destroy the world and the weak for no good reason any one of us can say, corrupt priests and dumb postulants all the way down.